Exhibit A: thirteen-year-old Cam binge-downloading hundreds of wallpapers, floor tiles, and eye colors.
Exhibit B: thirteen-year-old Cam, two weeks later, uninstalling the game and all the recently acquired add-ons.
It comes with a guilty solace: controlling an animated version of yourself and your friends instead of interacting with one another in real-life, spending hours completing mundane tasks to get that +1 Cleaning skills when your real mother has to remind you seventeen times to empty the real dishwasher.
 |
| A once-in-a-lifetime moment of Sims me doing the dishes |
But there is always one aspect of which I never seem to tire: World Building. Break open that Build Mode. Sink that entire lot into a pond. Throw in a dozen more windmills. Name that Downtown "Telenovela".
The demands of World Building are seemingly endless: what does the terrain look like? what natural disasters are common? how do people dress? what's the architectural style? what jobs do everyday people have? is there magic?
As both a visual and linguistic artist, trying to keep straight all those images in my head get confusing. I just spent five minutes yesterday trying to remember a character's mom's name because I never got around to making a family tree. But having the opportunity to construct houses for the characters in my story is hands-down one of the best things my tweenage self ever discovered.
 |
| One of many houses, exterior. Interiors are (c) |
First off, designing a house for your characters gives you a realistic view of space, style, and dimensions. Using The Sims to render a 3D model is vastly more impressive than a simple paper and pencil drawing. I will forever know that my girl Samantha climbs up the stairs and takes a right to walk down a long hallway to get to her bedroom. I'll know the north and east windows let in way too much sunlight every morning, and not even the massive maple tree on the east side can block out that ball of fire.
I'm forced to consider aspects I might have otherwise overlooked, like if characters would keep their bedrooms messy or neat, what colors they like, what clothes they'd own. It becomes obvious that I'm not just building a house, but I'm crafting a home, and I'm exploring the character through the space they live in.
I will spend hours on hours constructing a home before I start designing a Sims family to live there, if ever. You cannot honestly tell me you've considered how many baths & half-baths your protagonist's home has, or what kind of light fixtures there are, or how much counter space is in the kitchen. We just think that stuff is just "there" and worry about our character's love-square about to fly off the tracks. BUT SOMETHING MUST BE SAID FOR DESIGNING EVERY TILE PATTERN, WINDOW CURTAIN, OR WALLPAPER SWATCH.
 |
| A diagram showing how you can customize furniture by texture / pattern, layers, and 256 coloring (by Norma Blackburn of Carl's Sims 3 Guide) |
One aspect about The Sims 3 that I'm working to death is the ability to customize the color of anything: ever 256 shade/hue/tint is available to you, dozens of patterns/textures/woodgrains. You can get so specific. You can really see if a mahogany wood looks alright with cerulean-painted walls, or if that white leather sofa will look nicer next to that black bookcase or maple-wood door.
You can view the house from 360 degrees, from a bird's eye, a worm's eye. You think about the landscaping, or if there's a 1 or 2-car garage, or what kind of fencing you should have for your fenced-in yard.
Let's end with this so I don't go on for an eternity about The Sims: when the author knows what the environment / building / home looks like for their characters, they are less likely to make simple mistakes describing the layout. In fact, they are more likely to actually describe the layout, which will help your readers better imagine what the world looks like, which means your characters won't just be walking around in a box.
No comments:
Post a Comment